Denise and Kush, or rather, Denise, in general and how this episode and the show and Sean O'Connor pushing this character down our throats ... this is what I feel at the moment.
I can say what I want here on my own blog, rather than risk the bullying antics of a troll who's only serious efforts are to target and try to bully me into silence about my criticism of this character.
This should have been an episode totally about Abi's 21st birthday party. We've been hearing about this event for weeks. Instead, we dealt mostly with the aftermath of the incident in the park and with everything Denise and Kush.
I really hope the next EP has the balls to hand Diane Parish her P45. As good an actress as she allegedly is, that doesn't mean she's necessarily entitled to an indefinite position on the programme. Too often, producers struggle to find viable storylines for genuinely talented actors; but then, a lot of genuinely talented actors don't choose to carry on being associated with tripe like this,but I guess her generous salary, courtesy of the British taxpayer, has made her lazy and content to suck the public tit.
This is a character who's been largely irrelevant since 2010. Producer after producer struggled to know what to do with her. She stood around being a straight man to Nina Wadia and the unfunny Tameka Empson for years. Newman tried to put her with an established family like the Beales, but DTC wanted none of that. Hell, DTC couldn't even start a pithy storyline he started about her. Still, standing around in the background and issuing the odd snarky remark is nice enough work to pay for the expensive mortgage, the school fees, the au pairs and the designer nails - not to mention the expensive bling Denise wears on eight of her ten fingers and which she never thought to pawn in order to buy herself some food.
Now, all of a sudden, she's front and centre and absolutely everything positive about the show. Characters who'd never spoken to Denise in their lives are now falling over themselves to smile, pass a word or two or marvel at her fortitude, her strength, her intelligence, her beauty. We got yet another soliloquy from Kush on that subject tonight, as her ego swelled magnificently beneath her coy, humbly flattered exterior, complete with fluttering eyelashes.
Here's the cold, hard, honest truth, and the DeniseBots of the cyberworld - some of the worst kind of passive-aggressive bullies I've ever seen - can suck this up. She isn't kind, patient, gentle and caring. For years, in fact all the years she's ever been on the show, she's only ever cared about herself and her immediate family. She spent the majority of her time sneering and looking down her nose at most of the other residents, including (a lot of time) her own sister, and the rest of the time, she was lathing them down with the rough side of her tongue.
She isn't strong. She's always been dependent on some sort of man, and her judgement in that department has always been wrong. She's not even enormously intelligent. A GSCE in English Literature begs the abililty to express oneself coherently, intelligently and literately. Denise has none of this ability. She cannot string a sentence together unless it's filled with glaring grammatical errors, which aren't intentional - it's because that's the way she speaks, and she doesn't know any better. That's ignorance.
It's also ignorance combined with belligerance and a sublime sense of entitlement which caused her behaviour at The Minute Mart. Who sounds off to the media about the entity which employs you? And then who expects no punishment regarding this - her rudeness to the Area Manager and her refusal to see her anger management problem. That anger is regarded as strength; it's not. It's the weakness of a bully - so maybe that's why all the passive-aggressive keyboard warriors admire her so much. Seriously, who walks out on a job and then, instead of looking for other employment, continues to drink, eat out, and fuck around with her best friend's son (a man young enough to be her son) until she wakes up one morning and discovers she has ten quid left to her name? Who is so intelligent and so up her arse in pride that, rather then tell supportive residents of her financial concerns, she'd rather eat from rubbish bins? That's stupidity.
Yet she plans on getting a job with the Council because she has to eat, she wants to work their in order to try to sabotage whatever plans they might have about the Community Centre. That's Sean O'Connor's new image of her as the hero of the piece, the saviour of the community. Tonight, she became Saint Theresa, calmly stepping beatifically between a confrontation between Martin and Kush over the incident in the park, something which Kush never disclosed to Martin or Stacey.
And here's another cold, hard fact: In real time, the Council wouldn't look twice at Denise. All they'd have to do is run a CRC background check to find that not only does she have a criminal record, she's on discharge from an assault charge. As for her references from The Minute Mart, the best she could legally hope for from Yolande is a terse statement saying she'd worked there for so many years and that would be that. Prior to her last explosive exit from that job, there's also her previous exit to consider - sacked on the spot for stealing wine over a period of time and actually threatened with prosecution.
As for the sad-eyed, panda-faced Kush, his poetic declaration of undying love for Denise is merely a euphemism for his Oedipal complex. Kush cannot compete, nor even exist in a relationship of equals, which is why his relationship with Shabnam was doomed from the start. He was too immature to contemplate any relationship which would have seen him as a husband, on an equal footing with a wife from his own age demographic, as well as the responsibility of being a full-time father - dealing with all the strife, pressures, stress and tension, as well as the redemptive and morally cleansing love of such a relationship.
He chose to blame Shabnam for the problems in their marriage, when the real problem lay with him, his lies,his deceit and his own emotional immaturity. Shabnam wasn't enough. Here was a man who was pithy enough to use his dead wife as a chat-up line. The dead wife will always be an ideal to him because they weren't together long enough for reality to set in with Kush. There wasn't enough time for the needy Carmel to dig her claws into that relationship, the way she did when he was with Shabnam.
The hard truth is that Kush is the ultimate manchild,the horny guy who wants sex without the responsbility of a serious relationship with someone in his own bracket. Carmel talks to him and treats him as though he were an adolescent schoolboy, and Denise also speaks to him this way. Whenever she does, his guard drops and he instinctively takes on a relaxed mien. He's in his element. Give him an older woman to mother him, suckle him and fuck him and he's happy. There's no chance of a child to vie with him as the centre of attention. He will double as child and lover, with Denise always getting the upper hand in an unequal relationship ... This is why Kush doesn't want more than what he already has with Arthur. He's happy to have his son for an hour or two a week, to babysit now and then, play dates and horsing around, with no real parental responsablities. Martin will do the heavy lifting because Kush doesn't want that adult responsibility. Tamwar recognised exactly what he was. The only sort of relationship he ever hoped to pursue with someone from his own demographic is that of a sexual predator, preying on vulnerable women at a low point in their lives, and pulling out - literally and figuratively - before he was consumed by a relationship wherein his partner just might be his equal.
Carmel called the police. She bet both ways. She reported the incident regarding Kush as a warning to Kush and in hopes that Denise would step forward and admit that it was she who kicked the dog, and she reported Keegan because of his association with Shakil. I don't understand why Keegan would even bring Stacey into the equation, apart from her outburst at his mother when they moved in. Yes, the police would need to know about his history with Denise, but would the police randomly show up at the Fowler house on the report that Stacey was a "nutter?" This works well for Carmel as well, because we know the ultimate aim for her is to have Social Services remove Arthur from the Fowlers and give him to her.
News flash! In the middle of writing this blog, it's just been announced that Sean O'Connor has abruptly left EastEnders. The biggest rat has deserted a ship he caused to sink.
This deserves some comment before the dissection of the rest of the episode. It's actually mete that news of O'Connor's sacking was released just after this poor excuse of a majoe episode was aired. This should have been a major episode with something - well, major happening. We've certainly had our interest tweaked less-than-subtly for weeks about Abi's 21st birthday party, so much so, that we knew that whatever could go wrong would go wrong.
But what we got was sheer O'Connor drivel and mundanity. Oh, he was capable of the occasional surprise - the revelation that Lee had planned the raid on the Vic, for example; but when the big occasion arose, we got served up a helping of damp squib.
Consider the characters of Ben and Jay, for example. Ben's sister, Louise, has, for the past couple of weeks, been subjected to a barrage of rumours and lies about her allegedly getting drunk at a party and not remembering sleeping with a guy. Where was Ben in all of this? He should have been belloweathering for the blood of this guy who was passing such shit around about his sister. Where was he, in fact, the night Louise did get drunk, start vomiting blood and fell into a fit?
The answer? Nowhere to be found.
O'Connor has sunk Ben and Jay into a Millennial version of Minty and Garry. They are Men Behaving Badly in a house share, guzzing booze, leaving discarded pizza about the house and playing drinking games with Donna, a thirtysomething old enough to know better. And when they're not doing all of the above, they're bad-mouthing Abi behind her back.
They are being presented now as a couple of losers. The most action Ben has seen since the death of Paul has been a one night stand with Johnny Carter, and all Jay does is stand in the distance and leer at girls through a booze-enhanced gaze. Jay did nothing but drink like a fish at Abi's party and make goo-eyes at some blonde extra standing around and looking like the Norwegian nanny in the previous night's episode. Ben did nothing but look after Jay.
He was looking after Jay when a drunken Jay accosted Josh just to inform him that if he needed any advice about Abi, just consult himself, Jay, and Ben, of course, because they'd both been there and done that with Abi; and he was looking after a very drunken Jay when they had to wheel him home in Donna's wheelchair.
Under O'Connor, Ben has been so far removed from the Mitchell dynamic, it's difficult to remember that he is, indeed, a Mitchell. Prior to this episode, we had the totally embarrassing scene of a much-loved original character, Kathy, having to eat crow at the table of Queen Jane, the woman who binned her granddaughter's carcass on the Common.
I think it fair to say what we've all been trying to deny for the past seven years - that this is, indeed, a show in crisis; that for EastEnders, four episodes a week are bereft, whilst Emmerdale goes from strength to strength on six and Corrie is about to do the same. Those shows have stronger writers, better casts, more pacing and organising and, above all, producers who know and understand the show. Whoever is brought in after John Yorke's temporary tenure, to run the thing better not be someone who furthers the emphasis of characters whom he or she fancies to the detriment of the show. This means no more BranningVille, no more Carter Conundrum and no more Adventures of Denise and Michelle.
Get a grip.
It's Her Party and She'll Cry if She Wants To ... We got weeks of hype about Abi's 21st, an event in which only she seemed to take interest. Her mother didn't even bother to show up, and it was held in a glorified burger bar.
The interesting animosity/co-dependent relationship between Abi and Lauren should be interesting. Forget the offensive racial stereotypes of the awful, unfunny and uninteresting Fox non-sisters. The Branning girls could be interesting, if only from the perspective of being like the Mitchell sisters, except that they really don't like each other.
Instead, it's that last aspect which comes to the fore. They really aren't that likable. Abi isn't a psychopath, as some have suggested. She is, instead, a spoiled brat of a child, who's never grown up and who doesn't want to grow up. She's been jealous of her older sister only since a crisis developed which meant that both her parents had to focus on Lauren when Abi was in the middle of her A-Level exams. She isn't evil or lacking in empathy, she's just spoiled.
Abi wants to be loved. She wants her father's undivided attention, and she wants a boyfriend. A lot of her immature turmoil erupted when Jay binned her, and Lauren was about to embark on a relationship with Peter Beale. When it comes to Lauren, jealousy guides Abi.
That said, Abi genuinely loves her father, and she is genuinely fond of Dot. In fact, she'd readily have remained living with Dot, had Jay, Ben and Donna not bullied her in her face about moving in with them - not because they really dug her personality and wanted her around the place, but because they wanted her rent money, and they appreciated the fact that she cooked and cleaned.
Lauren, on the other hand, is only concerned with herself before all others. At best, she disdains Abi, until she really needs her help and moral support. Abi spares no punches. She knows exactly what Lauren is about. She knows she's dishonest and secretive, that she's never satisfied with what she's got,and she can see by Lauren's behaviour that she's anything but satisfied with Steven; in fact, Abi suspects that Lauren's interested in Josh.
The party was all about Abi being played by yet another sexual predator, who had an interest in her sister and who was intent on bringing Lauren's jealousy out into the open. He succeeded, and that was cruel to Abi, who was actually naive enough to have believed that Josh, whom she'd only seen one other time in her life, and that when her face was smeared with ink, was actually interested enough in her to attend this party, or even that he was remotely romantically interested.
The highlight of the segment was the appearance of Cora. Odd, that Cora attended Abi's 21st, but there didn't seem to be any sighting of Dot, the grandmother with whom Abi had lived for quite some time. Ann Mitchell steals the scene in any episode, casting verbal asides at Max, sarcastically marvelling in his character transformation and accusing him of buying favour with his daughters.
The scene which should have been the climax of the episode should have been the kitchen showdown, where everything Abi verbally hurled at Lauren was true. Lauren does make everything all about her. In fact, her relationship with Steven and with her son is all about her having to have this wonderful job. Lauren also wasn't interested in Abi's welfare or rescuing her from potential embarrassment from Josh. She relished telling Abi that Josh was engaged. In fact the bitterness she felt in having learned this, she directed at Abi; and her leaving the party in hot pursuit of Josh didn't go unnoticed.
The twist in the tail of this silly storyline could have been dark and frightening. Instead, it was boringly predictable. Lauren sits in the café and listens to Josh tell her not only that he fancies her (with no word of him leaving the fiancée) but also that he knows that she's interested in him sexually, only to have Lauren describe Steven in terms she might use to describe a faithful pet (loyal, dependable) and to assert that she's staying with him. At least, it seems that, upon learning that Josh, himself, was in a committed relationship may have just opened Lauren's eyes a bit to his real motives of interest. So the budding affair, for the moment, didn't happen.
Instead, with Abi sulking in the kitchen at Beales', she cannot resist goading Steven with the fact that Lauren appears to have left the party with Josh, completely oblivious to Steven, reminding him that Lauren only acts in her own self-interests. The scene ends with a psycho Steven, shoving Abi up against the wall to begin having angry sex - angry consensual sex - with her.
It's odd, because had Abi not have appeared to respond to his sudden advance, this could almost have been a rape. There was no lust or passion, just anger and a desire on Steven's part to exert power and control, the two dominating forces which motivate a rape. But Abi seemed to welcome his action, more or less, as a release or revenge against Lauren. Yet it's certain that Steven won't want Lauren to know about this.
Remember the last time angry sex occurred between two characters whose point of reference was the woman's sister, with whom the man was obsessed?
Jack and Roxy, and the result of that was Amy; so maybe Steven will get the child he wanted with Lauren, with Abi, although the thought of Abi as a mother is quite repusulsive. Lorna Fitzgerald looked like a 12 year-old dressed in her mother's cocktail dress.
Poor episode from a poor producer.
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